Google is imbuing the Street View app with some clever new features in its latest update. This version adds automatic face detection for 360 photos for quick blurring, groups together unpublished 360 photos by place or time, and adds a share link to user profiles. Additionally, a teardown shows that there's a new feature on the way that will clue in ambitious users about nearby places that should be photographed.

What's New

Official Changelog:

Unpublished 360 photos will now group together based on place or time.

There's a fresh update to Street View rolling out today and it has a little something for everyone. Counting among the changes in this release, there's a new satellite mode and a toggle for photographers to market themselves for work. A few visuals have been tweaked, including a better-looking search results screen. And a teardown item lets us know that the developers are planning a cool little feature that can take care of blurring out faces before uploading photos for the public to see.

Have you ever opened up Street View in Google maps and tried to move more than a couple of steps to get a good look around? It's useful and kinda cool, but also utterly horrible. Every move required a tap on the little arrows at the bottom, and you had to wait a little bit after each tap before making the next one. Plus, the arrows weren't always very clear about where they would take you. Seriously, it was really bad. But there's great news: Google is throwing out the old arrows and switching to a new swipe-to-move feature that makes Street View super fluid and much easier to use.

Street View is a fun digital tool for exploring the huge world we live on. An update to version 2.0.0.114257855 began rolling out earlier this week, and in addition to bringing far too many digits, it also has a few new features, a few visual tweaks, and improved support for spherical cameras. It looks like this one is rolling out pretty fast, but if you're in need of a download link, it's at the bottom of the post.

In yet more app news today, Google pushed out updates to Maps and its cousin Streetview.

First, Google Maps received the promised offline mode, wherein you can pan to a certain area and save it for use without an Internet connection. Pretty neat, though it remains impossible to use navigation offline, limiting the practical applications of this feature.

Additionally, Street View saw a minor update that should improve everyone's favorite compass mode - devices with a gyroscope should now be able to use it more smoothly.

Google unleashed a small round of updates today, bringing new features to both the Play Books and Street View apps. Play Books has been updated with a brand new UI for devices running Android 2.2/2.3, including the nifty 3D page-turning animation users of Books' tablet interface have come to know and love.

Users can also add home screen shortcuts for individual books, allowing you to jump straight into your favorite book without actually opening the app. The update also enables offline search, and ensures that your device's display will stay on during TTS.

Google Street View, on the other hand, got a slightly less major update (but an important one nonetheless) – the app now includes Ice Cream Sandwich's signature action bar and action-overflow button for those running Android 4.0+, bringing its interface into line with ICS' current design standards.

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I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.